What Goes Around
Posted on | February 15, 2007 at 7:57 am | 6 Comments
The first cellular phone I ever bought was an AT&T Go Phone. That was back around 1995 or so. It was very large and I carried it around in my backpack. I’ve stuck with AT&T all these years, even when Cingular bought them. Instead of that huge behometh from the 90s, I now have a sleek black RAZR. At the time of the merger (or whatever it was), I didn’t bother to change the tag on my file cabinet folder of cell phone bills from AT&T to Cingular. Some things I’m pretty lazy about. Okay, many things I’m lazy about. Anyway, that stupid tag has been staring me in the face for years, screaming “AT&T!!” at me even though I was sticking Cingular bills into it. I gotta admit it bothered me, seeing as how anal retentive I am. But laziness wins out.
So I was very happy to learn that the new AT&T has bought Cingular (or however that works out) and that Cingular is changing its name to AT&T. Now I really don’t have to change that tag. I feel vindicated. Could it be that laziness is the key to happiness? Imagine if I had changed that tag. Now I’d have to change it back! My laziness saved me a lot of time. Thank you, Cingular/AT&T. Now buy Qwest.
Latre.
Comments
6 Responses to “What Goes Around”
February 16th, 2007 @ 1:24 am
> My laziness saved me a lot of time.
I’ve been using the same approach to flossing since about ‘95 as well.
It’s like we’re twins!
February 16th, 2007 @ 8:08 am
I’m addicted to flossing. Sometimes I’ll do it 4 times a day. Hmmm, maybe that should’ve been one of my “six weird things”.
February 16th, 2007 @ 10:47 am
Your Lazy is stronger than mine, you are the Master. I finally revved up the initiative and relabled my AT&T folder to Cingular last year; so, you win. I’m calling it a partial victory since I’m giving up and switching to Verizon. That’ll show them what they get for making me change my file folder back!
In Dilbert, Bob the Dinosaur once pointed out that, “If you just wait, pretty soon an ice age comes along and solves your problem.” I found this to be true in the Corporate setting. Every month some new lame program would be annouced, heralded by the company wide email announcement. At first I would grouse to myself about the lamitude but nonetheless start beavering away on whatever it was.
Then there was the epiphany…what would happen if I just hit delete on the e-mail messages? It turned out that 95% of the time the answer was “Nothing”. Almost all of the make-work things got cancelled or mutated into something new before anyone ever checked to see that they were done. In fact, I saw the certain people were worse than others about creating this busy work. For those “special” contributors I made email filing rules that dumped their emails straight into the Trash folder thus saving me the arduous chore of even pressing the Delete key. Thanks, Bob!
February 16th, 2007 @ 11:06 am
You could, of course, use a generic label like Cell Phone, like you did for Satellite TV. But that would ruin the fun of this post. And, since you hadn’t already done that, it would still require creating a new label, which would ruin the beauty of the lazy solution.
I think someday, all these mergers will result in once company that provides virtually all services, and then we’ll only need one folder for GigantiCo, or whatever it’s called. Of course, they’ll just take our entire paycheck, and give us back a living allowance, so maybe we won’t even need that folder.
February 16th, 2007 @ 2:00 pm
Almost all of the make-work things got cancelled or mutated into something new before anyone ever checked to see that they were done.
I’ve discovered that same thing. Has any corporation ever (or in the last ten years at least) “stayed the course” on new policies/programs?
February 16th, 2007 @ 5:06 pm
>
It’s not in the nature of things. The quarter-by-quarter business model makes public corporations very myopic. OTOH most of the policies I was ignoring needed to be ignored because they were a resource sink hole.